It's all in the music: Decoding Shostakovich

Jan. 23, 2014

Updated Jan. 22, 2014 4:01 p.m.

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Russian Composer Dmitri Shostakovich is shown during a press conference, June 15, 1973, Chicago, Ill. He came to the area to receive an honorary degree from Northwestern University on June 16. FRED JEWELL, ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Solomon Volkov will be a guest of the Pacific Symphony's Decoding Shostakovich festival. COURTESY OF THE PACIFIC SYMPHONY

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Dmitri Shostakovich (right) accompanied by a western sector German policeman on his way to plane at Tempelhof airport in Berlin. Shostakovich, Russian composer, heads a Russian delegation attending a "peace rally" in New York. The delegation departed from Berlin for New York on March 22, 1949. (AP Photo) VON NOLDE, ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Dmitri Shostakovich, Russian composer, left with Alexander A. Fadeev, secretary general of the Secretariat of the Union of Soviet Writers and a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR arrive for the Cultural and Scientific conference on World Peace to be held on March 23, 1949 in New York City's Waldorf Astoria Hotel. HARRY HARRIS, ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Dmitri Shostakovich, Russian composer, lifts his hat in greeting on alighting from an American Overseas Airlines plane on March 23, 1949 at New York's LaGuardia field from Berlin. He is a member of the seven-man Soviet delegation to the Cultural and Scientific Conference on World Peace to be held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. ANONYMOUS, ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (left) and American composer Aaron Copland get together, prior to the opening dinner of the Cultural and Scientific conference for World Peace in the Waldorf-Astoria in New York on March 25, 1949. Shostakovich is a Russian delegate to the conference. ANONYMOUS, ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Dmitri Shostakovich, in trouble with Soviet authorities in the past, was hailed on the venue of his 60th birthday shown Sept. 24, 1959, as a great national genius of the Soviet Union. He has been awarded the title, hero of socialist labor, highest title in the Soviet Union. He is the first composer to be so honored. ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Composer Dmitri Shostakovich. COURTESY OF THE PACIFIC SYMPHONY

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Composer Dmitri Shostakovich. DEUTSCHE FOTOTHEK

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Carl St.Clair will conduct the Pacific Symphony in Shostakovich's 10th Symphony as part of the Decoding Shostakovich festival. DREW A. KELLEY, FOR THE REGISTER

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Composer Dmitri Shostakovich as a young man. COURTESY OF THE PACIFIC SYMPHONY

Russian Composer Dmitri Shostakovich is shown during a press conference, June 15, 1973, Chicago, Ill. He came to the area to receive an honorary degree from Northwestern University on June 16. FRED JEWELL, ASSOCIATED PRESS

“I think that it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth (Symphony),” says the composer Dmitri Shostakovich in his memoirs.

“The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in ‘Boris Godunov.’ It's as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, 'Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,' and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering 'Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.' What kind of apotheosis is that? You have to be a complete oaf not to hear that.”

Welcome to the world of Shostakovich, where musical meaning is coded or ambiguous or secret or even clear as day but said to be something else. The ending of the Fifth Symphony, to which the quote above refers, written after the composer received what amounted to a death threat from Stalin, is seemingly victorious, a major-keyed brass paean with drums. It appeared, at least to some, to glorify the Soviet state, and got Shostakovich out of the trouble caused by his scandalous and lurid opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.” The Fifth was labeled “a Soviet artist’s creative response to justified criticism.”

Shostakovich died in 1975. His obituary in the New York Times called him a loyal Communist. “Testimony: the memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov” was published in 1979 and completely changed our understanding of the composer. He led a double life, saying one thing officially and another in his music, telling one interviewer this and another interviewer that, depending on the situation he found himself in. It was a matter of survival.

“I’ll tell you that when I read ‘Testimony’ … by far the most important sentence in that book for me was that sentence,” says musicologist Joseph Horowitz of the “forced rejoicing” quote. “The moment I read it I realized it was right, and it was something I had never before absorbed.” He chuckles at the composer’s “complete oaf” remark.

Horowitz, the author of “Conversations with Arrau,” “Understanding Toscanini” and many other books, is artistic advisor to the Pacific Symphony. Together with conductor Carl St.Clair he has helped fashion the orchestra’s latest festival, “Decoding Shostakovich,” which will look into the composer’s work in a variety of ways, in concerts with an actor speaking Shostakovich’s words, talks, master classes, seminars and even a book club focused on “Testimony,” many of the events in collaboration with Chapman University.

The festival runs from Jan. 30 to Feb. 8. (A full calendar of festival events is available at pacificsymphony.org.) As part of the main program at Segerstrom Concert Hall, St.Clair and the orchestra will play the ending of the Fifth Symphony, offering the quote and other historical details as context, and ask the audience to ponder whether it expresses rejoicing or forced rejoicing.

Controversial memoir

Volkov, Shostakovich’s interviewer and the author of “Shostakovich and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship Between the Great Composer and the Brutal Dictator,” is a guest of the festival and will appear at several events. The Russian musicologist has been vilified in certain circles of academia and “Testimony” dismissed as a fake.

The controversy is complex – “There’s a website called ‘The Shostakovich Wars,’ you could spend your next month reading that,” Horowitz jokes – and various prominent musicians have taken sides, with Mstislav Rostropovich, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Maxim Shostakovich (the composer’s son), Horowitz and St.Clair among many others vouching for the veracity of “Testimony.” (One of Volkov’s foremost critics declined to comment for this article.) But there can be no doubt that “Testimony” has completely reshaped the discussion of Shostakovich and the way we see him.

“He was an extremely intense person and anybody that knew him noticed this kind of electricity that surrounded him, physically, yes, you could feel it,” Volkov says on the phone from New York. “There are such persons when you meet them, they are so nervous, so high strung that you feel it physically. And that was the case with Shostakovich. If he wouldn’t be a great composer he probably would be able to work in this tarot business or telling the future or something like that because he wasn’t an ordinary human being that’s for sure, yes.

“I was in awe of him,” he continued. “He was everything not just for me but for the whole generation of Russian, then of course Soviet, musicians, and the whole strata of Russian/Soviet intelligentsia because he was able to tell something through his music that was not possible to tell about in literature.”

Volkov explains that this happened for several reasons. One was that Shostakovich was a public figure, a celebrity even. The Soviets denounced him in the newspapers. The Soviets praised him in the newspapers. The ups and downs of his career, as defined by the state, were widely known. As a result, the performances of his new works were highly anticipated and charged events. According to Volkov, diaries from the time now show that the audience was in tears after the premiere of the Fifth Symphony, and they weren’t tears of joy.

“When somebody is persecuted by the government, and if you feel that something is wrong with the system, then you tend to be in solidarity with this persecuted person, be it a composer like Shostakovich, a writer like Solzhenitsyn, an artist, famous opponents of the regime. So, people, yes, they read the message (in Shostakovich’s music),” Volkov said.

Since “Testimony,” some writers have begun to call Shostakovich a “closet dissident,” but Volkov doesn’t like the term. He says that the composer doesn’t qualify as a dissident because he had no coherent political views, unlike Solzhenitsyn, say. What’s more, his medium was music, which can mean various things to different listeners. Volkov leaves room for ambiguity in Shostakovich’s music.

“He was composing music that expressed his feelings,” he says. “His feelings were the normal feelings of a normal person, of a good person, in the abnormal, in many ways, situation.”

A middle ground

During the festival, St.Clair will conduct his first performances of the Tenth Symphony, one of Shostakovich’s darkest works. The second movement, one of the most frightening in the repertoire, is said to be a portrait of Stalin. The third and fourth movements are encoded with a theme made from the German initials of Shostakovich’s name. Like the Fifth, the Tenth can be read in various ways.

St.Clair studied the Fifth with Leonard Bernstein as well as with Russian conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, both of whom performed the ending of the Fifth as celebratory perorations. Bernstein performed the Fifth with the New York Philharmonic in the Soviet Union in Shostakovich’s presence in the late ’50s, to the composer’s delight. St.Clair has notes from Rozhdestvensky written in his score, with this at the end: “This is undoubtedly, without question, into a victory.” The conductor told St.Clair that “I talked to Shostakovich about this, this is the way I conduct it, this is the way he liked it.”

As a result, St.Clair says he can’t hear the ending of the Fifth Symphony as anything but victorious. But he has a middle ground solution. For those pounding drumbeats at the end, St.Clair says, “I always tell the percussionist that if you ever wanted to just lay your fist into somebody, this is the moment to do it because that’s exactly what Shostakovich is doing. This is really pounding what you have been victorious over, whether it’s oppression, whether it’s the Stalinist regime, whether it’s Stalin himself for me it doesn’t matter.”

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